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The marketing plan-as-you-knew-it is dead

The traditional marketing plan is as dead as Tupac, and it won’t come back. Ever. So if you are still writing up intricate plans to impress your boss and colleagues, please stop doing so. You will have probably noticed – that is, if you are also in the game of rolling out your plan – that you never quite realise your plan and that you need to adapt as you are rolling out.

So why do you waste valuable time on brainstorming, thinking things through, writing and the oh so cumbersome approval process? By the time your plan gets approved the market has changed already.

Agile in marketing and communications

I write this now because I just have discovered a new way of looking at all things in marketing and communications. It’s called agility.

Of course we are all agile, we manage multiple projects and priorities and we shift our attention swiftly to the one that needs it most. (or the one that shouts the loudest) But that is not agile. That is chaos.

A colleague of mine, Marielle Roozemond, is a certified agile marketeer and trainer. She invited me to experience one of her training sessions. She defines agile in marketing and communications as “a combination of methods to deliver projects within time and budget, guaranteeing value for your business owner and target audiences..”

The agile methods are further characterised by high involvement from stakeholders and short working cycles to incorporate change and to quickly provide parts of the deliverables that can already be put to use by the business.

The agile principles translated to a marketing context

Translating the principles from the agile manifesto to a marketing and communications context would give something like:

We value:
Responding to change over following a plan
Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns
Testing and data over opinions and conventions
Numerous small experiments over a few large bets
Individuals and interactions over target markets
Collaboration over silos and hierarchy

There is project management side to it, and a creation side. That is something I want to zoom into in my next post.

What do you think? Sounds like larks singing? Or growls like a big bad wolf?